Sony Plans to Demo Project Morpheus’ Wii U-Like Multiplayer at Events Later This Year

March 11, 2015Written by Jason Dunning

One of the more interesting Project Morpheus features that Sony hasn’t publicly demoed yet is the Wii U-like multiplayer, where one person is playing on the headset and the others are using a DualShock 4 on the TV.

According to Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida, who spoke with Games Industry recently, we should be seeing more of this feature at events later in the year:

One thing we designed as a feature into Morpheus is to let your TV show the clear picture of what the person wearing the headset is doing. So we can design games, like a Wii U game, one person is holding the big controller and the other people are watching the big TV, three people are using the DualShock 4, playing with the person in the headset or playing against the person in the headset.

So we don’t have the demo like that today but we are planning to show some examples of that at later events this year.

As Shuhei also said in the interview, the biggest challenge with Project Morpheus is getting people to try it, but “once you try it you get excited.” This wasn’t possible last year as the kit was too unstable, though with the mass production kit being sent out closer to launch next year, Sony will be “able to ship to many different places, different events, and to get as many people to try it.”

When it comes to sales expectations for Project Morpheus from a business standpoint, Shuhei said they “need to hit the minimum threshold in terms of install base so that developers can recoup their investment.”

He adds:

Day one we probably won’t need millions and millions of install base because unlike console games, where developers can spend $50 million to make one game, with the VR experience, the teams that are working on the VR games are really having fun withsmall teams and trying out different ideas, iterating.

Because no one knows what works in virtual reality yet, Yoshida doesn’t expect to see large companies investing big at first. However, he would like to see those companies “have small teams to create some small experiences and start releasing digitally on the store so they can learn and people can spend a little bit of money to have a variety of experiences.”